


stoic minds and bleeding hearts

by mishcollin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-11
Packaged: 2017-12-26 06:36:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mishcollin/pseuds/mishcollin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel discovers human memory is limited and sets out to remedy that situation; Dean makes some...interesting discoveries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stoic minds and bleeding hearts

They’re sitting on the couch watching a rerun of  _River Monsters_ or something else on the Nature channel when Cas, shaken from a heavy-lidded, beer-induced sleepiness, sits up straight and says suddenly, “I can’t remember what fruits were in the Garden of Eden.”

Dean flicks his eyes back and forth from the TV screen to Cas—he can’t really imagine what it is about Amazonian piranhas that would inspire a statement like that—and eventually says, “Uh, so?”

Cas turns wide eyes on him, eyebrows furrowed with bewilderment. “You don’t understand. I  _can’t_ remember.”

"Dude, I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. Don’t sweat it."

"Angels don’t forget, Dean," Cas says, running a hand agitatedly through his hair. "We remember everything."

"Yeah, well." Dean shifts on the couch and wets his lips, pauses for a moment, wonders how to go about this as delicately as possible. "Cas, humans….humans have limited memory space, okay? Well, I mean, there’s lots of space but we tend to get rid of the memories that aren’t as important."

Cas sinks back into the cushions of the couch, and he still has that glazed, panicked look that prompts Dean to offer him another beer. Cas rejects the offer and five minutes later heads off to bed, leaving Dean with a weird taste in his mouth.

Cas starts journaling. Dean suspects what he’s journaling  _about,_ but every time he asks, Cas gets this cagey look and evades the question. Soon Sam starts asking questions too, and when Cas won’t answer him, he starts quizzing Dean.

"Dude, how would I know?" Dean snaps at Sam’s fifth inquiry. "I’m not Cas’ keeper or something."

"Yes," Sam replies with a smirk, "you are."

Dean locks his jaw and says nothing to that, because if he’s being honest with himself, he’s as curious as Sam to know what Cas is scribbling away about.

One day about a week later, Dean knocks on Cas’ bedroom door; he’d hermited himself away for the last few hours, like he tends to do these days, and when he doesn’t get a response, Dean asks, “Cas?” and opens the door.

The room’s empty, and Dean can hear the shower running; seems to be Cas’ usual haunt these days, for whatever reason. Dean sighs and he’s about to leave when something catches his peripheral vision and he turns, already knowing what he’ll see, already hating himself for even considering the possibility.

Cas’ journal is discarded on his bed, a beat-up, leather thing with yellowed pages that Cas had found in the archives a few weeks back.

Dean sorts of drifts closer, nervously glancing at the bathroom door, but the water’s still going, and Cas is like a marathon showerer, so it’s not like he’ll be out anytime soon…

Despite the strange, twisting feeling of guilt knotting up Dean’s stomach, he reaches for the journal, runs a hand over the smooth, worn-in leather, and flips open to the first page.

It’s all in fucking Enochian, which what did he expect? Dean huffs out a short, irritated breath and mutters, “Of _course_ , Cas,” but is quickly surprised as he starts leafing through and sees snatches of Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, even a couple Egyptian hieroglyphics here and there. There are strands of thought in English too, which don’t really compute for Dean; things about red sand in a desert in Africa, the creation of the Dead Sea. One entry simply reads, “One time Uriel laughed so hard he shook the Himalayas.”

There are things about his siblings too; Dean sees familiar names scrawled out in smeared black ink. Anna, Gabriel, Inias. Balthazar. Samandriel. Michael. Lucifer, even.

Dean’s about to shut the book and castigate himself for snooping into Cas’ personal crap before his name catches his eye. His heart punching a quick pulse in his throat, he peers closer and reads, with a dry mouth, “Dean’s soul gripped onto me in hell.”

It’s so brief, yet so intimate, so explanatory, that Dean lets out a slow, shaky breath between his teeth. The entry continues on in Cas’ neat scrawl. “I don’t want to forget how the light of his soul lit the entirety of hell like a beacon, calling me through years of blood and darkness, like a siren song. When I finally found him, he told me to leave him, that he didn’t deserve to go back.”

Oh, shit. Oh  _shit._ This is getting too intense too fast but Dean can’t stop reading, his hands shaking a bit.

"He told me to look after Sam, and when he held onto me, everything was illuminated." There’s nothing after that, no elaboration for what the fuck that even means—what the fuck is that supposed to mean?—and Dean starts flipping through more pages, shocked by the repetition of his and Sam’s names.

Dean starts reading through and finds none of it is quite as monumental as the first; it’s little things, stupid shit that Dean doesn’t even remember. The first time he offered Cas a beer, the first time he and Cas fought side by side against a demon, even the time Dean had taken Cas to a brothel. The time he and Sam had gotten into a fight and Cas stopped by; Dean had taken him out for a drive and they’d stopped the Impala at a lake and sat out on the roof of the car. Cas hadn’t seemed to understand the reasoning behind it, but Dean remembers that night, the warm and necessary presence of Castiel by his side, in the ache Sam left.

Dean starts smiling when he sees some of the other stuff Cas has written down. The first time he made Sam laugh at a joke, and a time Bobby had offered Cas a whiskey and they’d sat out on the porch and said nothing at all. One night, a few years back when Sam was soulless and Dean in a drunken haze had told Cas to stay the night with him. Cas hadn’t slept, just sat on the couch and watched Dean, and Dean had bitched about it the next morning but of course he didn’t mean any of it. Cas had even scribbled out some of Dean’s prayers in purgatory; old stories Dean had told him about Mary, about Sam, about shit he’d done growing up. He didn’t think Cas had been listening, of course, and is astonished by how much Cas remembers from it.

There’s a warm center of heat radiating in the cavity of Dean’s chest, and it slowly expands until Dean finds it hard to breathe, reading over these entries of him and Sam, Bobby, bits and pieces of Ellen and Jo and Meg too.

One of the entries simply reads, “Dean, Dean, Dean,” to which Dean feels a weird lump rise in his throat and something strange smarts behind his eyes, painful and bright.

He’s so engrossed with reading that he doesn’t hear the shower turn off, nor the door open a few minutes later; the first thing to jar him out of his thoughts is a shocked, “Dean?”

Dean snaps the journal shut and feels his whole face flush bright red, shame and guilt so hot it burns when he turns to face Cas’ confused expression.

"Cas," Dean fumbles, "I’m sorry."

Cas frowns. “Why are you going through my journal?” He’s got an old pair of sweats on and a thin cotton t-shirt that sticks to the wetness on his chest like paper. His wet hair is tousled in all directions, and he looks so confused and endearing and hurt and fucking human that Dean kind of wants to punch himself.

"I’m really sorry," Dean says again, the flame in his cheeks starting to pulse, "I just, I wanted to, um." He clears his throat, tries again. "It’s none of my business what you. I mean."

Cas doesn’t say anything, just sort of keeps staring at Dean, and that’s fucking worse than if he’d yelled, gotten pissed.

"It’s just, I’m trying to help you, Cas. Sam and I both are. We’re worried about you, man. And all this stuff, I mean…it doesn’t matter, not really."

Cas straightens much more indignantly. “It  _does_ matter.”

"No, it doesn’t. Maybe it did, at one point, but that’s all behind you now. You don’t  _have_  to remember everything. And I get it, I know it’s freaky, especially if you’re used to remembering everything. But this stuff, about Sam and me? None of that matters.” He doesn’t even know why Cas had written it down. Cas had been alive for like thousands of years, after all, and it sort of blows Dean’s mind that he hadn’t seen more stuff about the Bible, or the fall of Rome, maybe even the invention of sliced bread, who fucking knows. Anything but him and Sam.

Cas looks deeply perplexed by this. “The stuff about you and Sam matters the most to me.”

And  _oh._ All the breath is punched out of Dean’s chest. 

Oh _._

 _“_ You—and Sam—are what I want to remember most,” Cas says, toweling off his hair and padding over to Dean to pluck the journal from his hands. “And what I’m most afraid that I’ll forget.”

Dean’s still kind of speechless. He kind of wants to do something insane, like hug Cas. Or maybe punch him. He doesn’t really know.

"There are certain memories that I—" Cas starts, and Dean kisses him without a moment’s forethought. Cas chokes out a soft, startled noise, and Dean has a moment to process the taste of toothpaste, the soft, tentative brush of Cas’ mouth against his lower lip before he pulls away, his head spinning, the heat in his face intensified to an inferno.

Cas is staring at him, eyes huge, pupils wide and dark, and Dean doesn’t have a fucking clue what to say.

Except he does. “Sometimes you’ve got to make room for new memories, Cas.”

And from Cas, softly, a smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Mumford & Sons' "Reminder."


End file.
